And the way the entire legal system handles child abuse cases needs to function with equal vigor in every county.

A diverse group of about 40 experts on protecting children raise those concerns in a draft plan recommending dozens of steps the state should take to more effectively combat child abuse in Tennessee. The group, known as the Joint Task Force on Children’s Justice/Child Sexual Abuse, met Thursday to hammer out final recommendations due to the governor and lawmakers next month.

DCS employees, child advocates, doctors, attorneys, and law enforcement leaders debated how forceful and detailed they should be in the report if they want to turn their ideas into reality.

“When it comes to the plan, everybody (here) already agrees with it, so the legislators are more likely to support it,” said Bonnie Beneke, task force chairwoman and executive director of Tennessee Children’s Advocacy Centers.

This year, the task force wants to see more consistency among Child Protective Investigative Teams, which exist in each county to investigate cases and make decisions about criminal charges. These teams include a detective, a prosecutor, a DCS staff member and a juvenile court representative, but enforcement varies widely from county to county.

“There is a huge need for them to be attending trainings at the same time,” said Emily Cecil, CAC training coordinator. “We have this law that it has to happen, but there’s nobody to enforce it, and there’s no penalties if it’s not done correctly.”

The difficulty of getting authorities to work together spurred many of the task force’s recommendations — and could be what triggered light laughter in the room Thursday. With law enforcement officials, social workers and psychologists looking on, questions about gaps in the system led to knowing glances around the room.

At another moment, when a DCS director asked whether DCS staffers had improved communications in the past year, her question was met with silence.

“Any at all?” she asked again.

“Communication,” one woman at the table offered haltingly, “is a really hard thing to do.”

Later, Beneke told the group that after almost two full years, DCS Commissioner Kate O’Day had recently agreed to meet with task force leaders and to sign off on their report. In the previous administration, meetings with the DCS commissioner had taken place quarterly, Beneke said.

In its draft report, the task force says there must be a better way for DCS — a $650 million state agency — to communicate with law enforcement departments and community service agencies, of all sizes, across the state.

DCS has already been working on one major program, “In Home Tennessee,” that tries to bridge the gap between the department and community service agencies, and the task force heard Thursday about progress on that project. Of the 12 DCS regions, seven have at least started the In Home Tennessee process, including three in the Nashville area.

New reviews

Marjahna Hart, a DCS director in the Office of Child Safety, told the group that a new way of reviewing child deaths will begin next year. Described as “event analysis,” the new approach touted by O’Day draws ideas from catastrophe management in the hospital, nuclear power and aviation industries. Ultimately, officials hope to learn from their mistakes and save children’s lives — although they have said the reviews won‘t be made public.

DCS will work with Vanderbilt University on those reviews.

Hart also shared O’Day’s request for additional state funding for caseworker salaries and hiring.

Attendees had the most questions about DCS staff training, which in the past year was disbanded at the Tennessee Center for Child Welfare at Middle Tennessee State University. The training moved in-house, although some of the same instructors and lesson plans came with it.

Task force members asked whether training documents will ever be as easily available as they had been before, online. A DCS official said that transition is still under way.

DCS training also figures prominently in the task force recommendations, which ask for better lessons for new hires, better use of the most experienced employees to share helpful ideas, and more instruction in working with children and parents with mental illnesses.

Ideas adopted

Task force recommendations often lead to action, including DCS policy changes, passage of laws and creation of new training to help make caseworkers more effective. The task force helped create a central call center for child abuse reporting and successfully pushed for highly trained forensic interviewers in abuse cases, to help coax important details from reluctant victims.